Metal Sun
by Tripleguess
Summary: TFA. Bumblebee takes a dare, and it doesn't end well. Hands up, who's surprised? Complete.
1. Chapter 1

Bulkhead tumbled gracefully through the ship's cockpit. Normally he would have been intrigued by the sensation of weightlessness, but circumstances dictated that his thoughts be elsewhere.

"The gravity unit must be burned out." He thought some more. "The twins borrowed this ship without telling Sentinel Prime, didn't they? Gravity units are expensive. He's going to be furious."

"Okay," said Bumblebee. "Maybe you were right. This was a bad idea. But it's okay. As soon as the wormhole reopens, we'll strap down and fly back through. No one will even know about the bet."

It didn't reopen. 


	2. Chapter 2

Bulkhead scooped up another shovelful of ore. It felt like his two hundredth of the day.

"Tell me again," he said, "why hitchhiking was such a good idea."

Bumblebee stabbed his chisel into the side of the tunnel. Chunks of ore starred with glowing blue deposits fell at his feet and clanked against his manacles. "I didn't say it was a good idea. I said it was _an_ idea. It seemed better than drifting through deep space in a ship with a burned-out engine."

"He seems to think the ship is still worth something. I saw him attach a tow cable while we were being cuffed." Bulkhead considered. "If he is a he. Hard to tell with this species."

"It's a he." Bumblebee's chisel stuck on the next swing. He planted a foot on the tunnel wall to pull it out. "He's probably going to melt our ship down and sell it in chunks."

"Or, he might repair the engine in order to sell it or use it himself. In which case we might be able to get it back."

"That would make Sentinel less mad, I suppose," Bumblebee grunted. He couldn't get the chisel out. Bulkhead leaned his shovel against the tunnel wall and lumbered over to help. Their united efforts - mostly Bulkhead's - freed the chisel and buried them to the knees in suddenly loosened ore.

"Well!" Bumblebee dusted his hands and surveyed their handiwork. "Looks like I can take the rest of the shift off - you've got plenty to shovel."

"If only we hadn't just buried my shovel."

"I'll help you look for it." Bumblebee whipped out his stinger and fired it into the pile over Bulkhead's protests. The resulting fireball blew them against the opposite tunnel wall and set alarms wailing all over the mine.

"I was trying to tell you." Bulkhead peeled himself off the wall, leaving a rock angel behind. "This is a type of energy ore. Cybertron uses something similar to catalyze the chain reaction inside a space bridge's -"

"Tell me faster next time!" Bumblebee flailed, still stuck inside his own rock angel. Bulkhead pulled him out just as the tunnel supervisor came huffing into sight.

"What happened here?" the supervisor snarled through his breath mask. He was vaguely humanoid, lumpy, and half the size of Bumblebee; it was the electric prod in his four clawed hands that made him dangerous, as Bumblebee had discovered when he objected to being manacled.

"A spark," Bulkhead answered quickly, "from Bumblebee's chisel against the rock. Blew the whole place apart. I don't know how one little spark could've done that."

The supervisor pulled his mask away from his piggish nostrils and sniffed, then snapped it hastily back in place. "Gas," he said, lowering his prod. "You metaloids aren't sensitive to it, or you'd be dead. Check the meter next time. We get a fan cart, blow it out topside before digging. Explosions waste fuel ore."

"Right." Bulkhead glanced at the meter strapped to his wrist. Either the mine owner made a habit of enslaving very large species, or he had a ridiculous assortment of meter sizes, because he and Bumblebee had been fitted for theirs as soon as they hit the ground. "Meters. We'll check them."

"Waste come out of paychecks." With that, the supervisor stalked away.

"I didn't know we got paychecks."

"I've heard of this on TV," Bumblebee said wisely. "It's called wage slavery."

"What's important," Bulkhead said, after making sure the supervisor was out of earshot, "is that he doesn't know about your stingers."

"Or your wrecking balls."

"Right. They cuffed us so fast we didn't get a chance to use them, but we will, when we make a break for it."

They spent the rest of the shift picking up the exploded ore. Bulkhead pointed out that the stars of glowing blue matter had shrunk or vanished entirely. "He wasn't lying. Explosions use up the fuel ore."

"So we're wasting our time clearing this mess."

"No, it's blocking the tunnel. If we don't pick it up now, they'll just make us do it after our shift ends."

"Wage slave," Bumblebee grumbled.

A different supervisor came down the tunnel to round up his newest workers and herd them back to their cells.

"Coming," Bulkhead said, hefting his shovel.

"Coming," Bumblebee said, hefting his chisel. Then he bent and, using his free hand, scooped the air around his ankle joints.

The supervisor sneered. "You malfunctioning already? If you need repairs after just two days, we'll put you in the smelter."

At first Bulkhead thought that Bumblebee had enough sense not to display his stingers. Later, after remembering the way the blank look on Bumblebee's face had turned to rage, he realized that Bumblebee had wanted the satisfaction of pounding the alien's face with his fists. It wasn't long until other supervisors converged on the fight, blowing their whistles. It took three of them to prod Bumblebee off the first supervisor. Bumblebee had had the upper hand from the start, but the supervisor had managed to rake him across the face, leaving claw marks on his cheek.

"Who's ready for the smelter now, tough guy?"

"All right, little buddy." Bulkhead held him back from starting a new brawl with the other supervisors as the incapacitated one was hauled away. "You proved your point. No smelter."

Bumblebee's shoulders drooped as he nursed the claw marks. "It wasn't that."

Bulkhead sighed. He had seen that movement countless times on Earth. Usually, Sari met it halfway.

"I know."


	3. Chapter 3

Bumblebee took a sip of his ration and gagged. "This is the worst energon-like substance I've ever tasted."

"Tell me about it." Bulkhead downed his in a single gulp as Bumblebee looked on from the bunk opposite him, horrified.

"How can you _do_ that?"

"Don't have to taste it that way," Bulkhead said, wiping his mouth with a shudder. "Much."

Bumblebee crinkled his face as he held his dirty mug up to the weak overhead light in their cell. "I don't think I can do that."

"Do it. We need our strength if we're going to get out of here."

"Oh, we're going to get out of here." Bumblebee's eyes popped wide open as a wicked smile spread across his face. He bolted his faux energon without, apparently, thinking about it, and slammed the mug down on his bunk. "I already have an idea."

X. X. X.

"You can't be serious."

"You got a better idea?" Bumblebee laid a hand on his spark, causing their ore cart to wobble dangerously, then winced as his manacles scraped his finish. "I am open to suggestions here."

Bulkhead looked back over his shoulder as the dead-end tunnel Bumblebee had just pointed out to him receded behind them. It had obviously been dug recently; the edges of the ore rubble on the bottom were sharp, and the floor there was not coated with the thick layer of ore dust that quickly settled over any object not in motion down here. Warning signs in alien script were plastered all over the back wall, and the supervisor for this shift had made it very clear to them that they were not to dig there.

"Dangerous," was all he would say.

"Which, as they don't care about us, means it's dangerous to _them_ ," Bumblebee reasoned. "They would gladly risk a couple of wage slaves for the chance to squeeze extra ore out of this dump."

"Bumblebee, that's all true, and as an engineer I tend to agree with your instinct that that is a weak spot. But if you noticed all that, you must have noticed the pump unit there and the stuff collecting on the floor."

"Yup." Bumblebee rubbed his hands together, making his manacles jingle like Christmas bells. "Water."

X. X. X.

"So you don't mind the fact that we're risking bringing a whole ocean down on our heads."

"Nope." Bumblebee had finished raking aside the rubble already on the floor of the tunnel. Now he tenderly replaced it with ore filched during their shift, emptying his back pack and then (without asking permission) Bulkhead's drawer. That done, he raked the rubble back over the ore, hiding the glowing blue stars. "We don't need to breathe air. They do."

Bulkhead checked both ways, then helped him push their cart back into the main tunnel. They had hurried to the dead-end so as to arrive at the end-of-shift check-in on time. "Prime might say there are ethical issues involved in flooding an area occupied by air-breathing organics."

"Ah, Prime. I wish he were here."

"Focus, Bumblebee. Flooding. Air-breathers."

"I thought of a solution to that too. Just now," Bumblebee admitted, when Bulkhead gave him a look. He scratched his cheek. The marks were healing, but without Ratchet's care they were probably going to scar. "We can hit one of the gas alarms before we blow the tunnel. That should clear the mine of everyone, including organics."

Bulkhead nodded. The supervisors might not care about a lost laborer here and there, but a complete workforce wipeout was something they did want to avoid. "The number one supervisor takes his workers to the deepest tunnel. When we see him run past, we'll know the mine is clear."

"Let's do it."

X. X. X.

Bumblebee scratched his cheek and writhed with impatience for the next megacycle, which was the amount of time they were given to recharge between shifts. Bulkhead used the time to refill, recharge, ruminate, and then go down a list of all the things that could go wrong. Bumblebee, who was pacing the two steps to and fro their cell allowed and hadn't slept at all, snapped.

"I don't care if it is a deep sea trench that will crush us instantly or the bottom of a swamp too muddy to see through or whatever! Nothing could be worse than being stuck here!"

His shoulders slumped. "Sorry. I didn't mean to yell."

Bulkhead patted his shoulder. "I'm with you, little buddy. I just didn't want you to be disappointed if it didn't work."

"You really think how I feel in the nanoklik before I get crushed to death by deep-sea trench pressures matters that much?"

"It's not a deep-sea trench. If it were, there would be half a mile of bracing. I think it's a lake or a shallow sea, and I have no idea where it will lead us."

"It'll lead us to our ship." Bumblebee thumped his spark. "I know it will."

Bulkhead thought about the time Bumblebee's hunch had led the both of them to the very door of Megatron's mine hideout. They had turned around, not knowing how close they had been until later. Bumblebee did a lot of stupid things, but he wasn't given to wishful thinking. His instincts tended to be correct.

The cell door rattled. It was their supervisor. The Autobots exchanged looks. Bulkhead rolled off his bunk.

"Let's go," he said.


	4. Chapter 4

"You ready?"

Bulkhead took a deep breath. The gas alarms blaring overhead made it hard to concentrate.

 _Instincts. Trust Bumblebee's instincts._

"Ready as I'll ever be!" he shouted back.

Bumblebee nodded and whipped out his stingers. The Autobots crouched behind their overturned ore cart. Bumblebee closed one eye and cracked off a shot at the buried ore.

The explosion was everything he could have hoped for. It left him blind, deaf and otherwise insensate for several nanokliks. When he came to, Bulkhead was lifting the cart off of him.

"Corner of the cart banged you in the head," Bulkhead said, tossing the cart aside. The cart tumbled away into the tunnels in slow motion. Bulkhead's voice had an oddly clear quality to it, and when the cart banged into the tunnel wall, Bumblebee felt the sound reverberate under his hood.

"We're underwater!" He sat up, pumping his fists in the direction he thought was up. The bubbles were headed that way, so he was probably right. "We're not crushed!"

"Time to follow the light." Bulkhead gave him a hand up and pointed. The warning signs were gone, along with the back of the dead end. In their place was a luminous hole. "I had to break the back out with my wrecking balls, but the explosion did most of the work."

Bumblebee rushed over and stuck his head out, not so much as looking left or right for danger. Far above their heads was a shining structure, beams and berths and vessels and flotation devices outlined against the sky.

"Look!" he screamed. "I was right! There's the surface docks! I see our ship!"

"You mean Sentinel Prime's ship, right?"

"Just look!"

Bulkhead looked. "How are we going to get there? It's straight up, and we don't float well."

"I have rockets, remember? Give me your wrecking ball. I'll go first and wrap it around something, and then you can winch yourself up. We're stealing our ship back!"

"Sentinel's ship."

"Whatever!"

X. X. X.

It was months after that that Bumblebee's plaintive transmissions finally raised a response from Cybertron. Neither he nor Bulkhead had been able to believe their eyes when they got a look at the repaired navigation readouts; they were light-years away from home, and there were no space bridges in the area. They had to slog through space the old-fashioned way, using the engine.

When he did receive a response, though, it was the exact person he'd been wanting to talk to.

"Prime!" Bumblebee waggled like a puppy when he saw the familiar red and blue paint scheme. "Thank heavens, a responsible person at last! Now I can go back to being a hothead."

"Baloney." Bulkhead leaned into the viewscreen. "You never stopped. Hiya, Boss-bot!"

"Bumblebee! Bulkhead!" Optimus didn't know whether to be relieved or furious. "After all this time - where have you two been? We looked everywhere for you!"

"Wait a minute." Bulkhead shouldered Bumblebee aside. "It was a wormhole, after all; the physics involved could have - Prime. How long have we been missing?"

Prime told him. Bumblebee stopped waggling.


	5. Chapter 5

"Earth..."

Bumblebee lost himself in the vidscreen, forgetting the energon can in his hand. He had called this image to mind so often after he and Bulkhead had been lost in a wormhole three hundred years ago. They had found their way back to Cybertron after many strange adventures. "There were times I thought I'd never see it again."

"Me neither." Bulkhead's gaze was one of satisfaction. It was his spacebridge work that had put Earth on the Cybertronian travel map. Tourism in both directions had boomed, even if he hadn't been around to witness it personally until now.

"I guess, by this time - everyone - we know, will have..."

Bulkhead knew who "everyone" was. He swirled his own can and remained tactfully silent. Bumblebee, intent on re-opening old wounds with the pizzazz with which he did everything he was interested in, pulled up a roster of Earth broadcasts and inputted a string of search terms. The vidscreen flipped through several similar but irrelevant results before landing on one that contained the magic words. Bumblebee stabbed the volume button.

"- with you live today to bring you the latest from Sumdac Intergalactic, led by fifth-generation CEO Sariana Sumdac. The unveiling of this quarter's technology research in jetpacks is the most anticipated event in -"

"Yeah, that makes sense," Bumblebee muttered over the broadcast. "She would've met some guy, gotten married, made protoforms." He crushed his can, spattering energon onto the vidscreen, where it fuzzed and sparked before evaporating.

"-making one of her rare FFFZZZTTlic appearances! Yes, it's - it's Ms. Sumdac herself! Keep roFZZZTTing -"

The image fuzzed, zoomed, blurred and refocused as the excited cameraman juggled his equipment. It finally settled on a distant (judging by the amount of jitter in the highly zoomed image) figure on the Sumdac expo center's speaker platform, a figure surrounded by massive bodyguards in Sumdac uniforms. She looked down, sensing the camera. Her waist-length hair rippled.

"Pause," Bumblebee snapped. He spread two fingers on the vidscreen, zooming the image even further.

"Wow," Bulkhead breathed. "She looks just like her. No wonder they named her after her, huh? 'Sari' plus 'ana;' 'Sari' because she looks like Sari, and the 'ana' because - uh... help me out here, buddy."

Bulkhead looked around.

"Bumblebee?"

X. X. X.

The expo center, perched atop a sleek and sparkling Sumdac Tower, was overflowing when Bumblebee got there. There were guards checking tickets at the entrance, but they were too busy gaping at Bumblebee to ask for ID. He walked past them unchallenged. Good. He was in no mood to tolerate delays.

"Sari!"

His voice rang out in the vast hall. The fifth-generation CEO, who had been trying on a series of jetpack models and was now talking to a sound technician about the finer points of the event's after-dinner speech, took one look and snatched the microphone out of the startled technician's hand.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, a surprise demonstration of the hush-hush project Sumdac has been researching for years - the Jetpack Suit 3000!"

She threw the microphone aside and leaped over the platform railing, drawing screams from the crowd three stories below. Metal plating subspaced into existence, covering her tailored dress suit, and the jet pack ignited with a subdued roar. She flashed across the vast interior of the expo center and out the open double doors, leaving a smattering of confused applause behind her.

"Oh no, you don't, sister," Bumblebee hissed. She had looked him in the eye as she had passed, and besides, she had nicked his shoulder paint, something he would have found hilarious had it happened to anyone else. He spun on his heel and ran after her. There was another round of screams as he leaped the towertop railing and spread his arms, hanging suspended in the Detroit sky like a metal sun.

Then he transformed and fired his turbojets. His wheels clung to the side of Sumdac tower as he hurtled downward in pursuit of the tiny figure below. Camerabots buzzed excitedly around his head like a cloud of flies, sicked on him by quick-thinking reporters, but soon fell behind. The silhouette of Sariana Sumdac grew larger, filling his vision as he caught up to her.

The street loomed. He transformed, using his turbojets to off-ramp from the building as he scooped Sariana up with both hands. Camerabots waiting to catch the race finale pinged against his armor as he spun into a violent deceleration, throwing showers of sparks from his heels and gouging arcs in the pavement. Prime would have something to say about that.

Smoke from his wheels clouded the air, making her cough. He rolled backwards out of the fumes to let her breathe. One look at her unshielded face and he knew that he'd been right.

"Why are you pretending to be -?"

"Shh-shhhh!" She looked wildly left and right at the remaining camerabots hanging on every word and banged her still plated arm against his chest.

"Ow," he said reflexively. It didn't really hurt, but it was habit.

"As everyone can see, I was _not_ pretending. The Jetpack Suit 3000 truly works! Those who argued that it was not ready for testing have been proven wrong." The arrogance of the words was undercut by her wheezy gasps. She had frightened herself badly.

"You were flying mostly down," Bumblebee pointed out. Then his processor caught up with what she'd said. "Wait, have you lost your motherboard? You threw yourself off a skyscraper in a piece of untested equipment?"

She wobbled to her feet and pointed skyward. "There is no progress without risk!" she grandstanded, for the benefit of the camerabots.

He held her up to his optics for close inspection. "You _have_ cracked a chip. There's risk and then there's plain being stupid."

"Like _you_ ever knew the difference, Mr. I'll-Just-Surf-Into-A-Wormhole-On-A-Bet-With-The-Twins-And-Everything-Will-Be-Fine," she hissed.

Bumblebee grinned guiltily. "Be that as it may, you still - hey. You never answered my question. Why are you pretending to be -"

She jammed her plated hands against his mouth. "We have a doubter!" she said loudly. "Well, yes, I agree. What can be duplicated is not a fluke. As you say. What's that -? Very well, I accept your challenge to a rematch!"

She jetted upward, hovering level with his optics. The bevy of massive bodyguards came charging out of Sumdac Tower's ground floor, panting and frazzled. They lowered their weapons at Sariana's wave.

"Don't worry," she called to them. "I'm safe with him." Then, "Race you to the old warehouse!" she yelled to Bumblebee over the sound of her jets, and fled.

"The old -? Oh, of course. Right." Bumblebee had figured out by this time that she didn't want to discuss her identity in front of the camerabots. The way they were swarming over her now, it was no wonder that she rarely made public appearances. It took half a second longer to connect her words with a building he hadn't seen in over three hundred years.

He started after her in robot mode, being as slow and flashy about it as possible in order to draw off most of the camerabots, then cut across two streets to pull the camerabots off her trail. When he judged her far enough away to be safe from them, he transformed and lost himself in a sea of Detroit commuters. The confused camerabots milled about in his rearview mirror, acquiring and then discarding yellow cars until the reporter gave up and recalled them. He chuckled.

He made it to the warehouse ahead of her, which was just as well; her jetpack gave the last of several coughs and expired at the door. Bumblebee kept her from slamming into the concrete.

"Thank you," she said, and coughed, this time from the smoke of the burnt out jetpack. She sat up and shrugged the jetpack off into his right palm. "I'm glad the camerabots didn't catch that. Ugh - this thing is heavy once the antigrav is off."

"You and untested equipment! First the key, then the dinobots, and now this!"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Preach it, O safety-minded one." She subspaced her helmet, releasing a cascade of waist-length hair. "What about your original question? You still wanna talk about that?"

"Um..." Bumblebee, still mad, scratched his head, searching for the thread of his earlier thought.

"'Why...'" she prompted.

"Right. Right. Why," said Bumblebee for the third time, "are you pretending to be your own descendent?"

"Because, you Cybertronian moron," Sari Sumdac said, "I'm over three hundred years old."

Bumblebee thought about that. Hard.

"Oh," he said at last.

X. X. X.

When Sari had said "Let's talk inside," Bumblebee had imagined a furtive meeting in a cobwebbed room. Instead, when she placed her unjointed hand in a secret panel by the door, the door rolled up to reveal a gleaming interior.

When the door rolled down behind them, he could see the dim gleam of a thousand standby lights before the motion sensors reacted to his first step and turned on the ceiling lights.

"Welcome home, Autobots," a recorded voice boomed. Omega Supreme's. He wondered when Sari had wheedled that out of him and Ratchet.

"Wow," he marveled. "It looks better than when we lived here." He could see why; the quiet whirrs and chirps of a small army of maintenance bots came to his audio receptors. He could see a few of them here in the front room, dusting and checking equipment and mopping the floor. One scurried to them at Sari's wave and took the burned-out jetpack.

"I wanted it to be here for you guys when you came back," she said quietly. "Even if I wasn't."

They exchanged looks. A miracle occurred: Bumblebee held his tongue for five cycles straight.

"You're alive," he said, and realized that she had just said the same thing. He laughed and snuggled her to his chest.

"We have," he said, _"so_ much to catch up on."


	6. Chapter 6

Shafts of sunlight fell between the edges of the broken skylight and the tree growing through it and made patches of glowing green on the ground. A copper rain chain, tied off to one of the branches and fed by a hidden sprinkler, tinkled and glistened from ceiling to moss garden floor.

"Still growing," Bumblebee observed. He turned his head as a flock of brilliant orange-and-red finches showered from one side of the tree, circled the room and filled it with high-pitched birdsong, then vanished beneath the leaves on the other side of the tree.

"They're endangered," Sari said. "The microclimate in here is perfect for them, so I offered to sponsor a breeding flock. (I have some holographic doodaws on the roof to keep them in.) I thought he would like that."

"He would."

Prime's room was neat and professional, just as he'd left it. There was a reader full of news clippings by the recharging station. Bumblebee saw scrolling headlines from the fireball incident that had been their ship crashing into Lake Michigan, the Soundwave incidents, and his own and Bulkhead's disappearance. As he watched, a maintenance bot scurried up and charged the reader's battery. A chess set sat on the desk, resplendent in holographic plastic wrap. The pieces were based on Sumdac drone models, and they alternated between executing game moves and wandering around the desk (fizzing every time they pierced the wrapping) in such a lifelike manner that he wondered whether Sari had used the key on them - a key which no longer existed. They were ideally sized for Prime's hands.

Bulkhead's room was stocked with extra energon, spacebridge manuals, and a few enormous canvasses.

"I can't wait to see what you've done to my room."

She turned pale, then red, then streaked down the hall on foot.

"Whoa, hold up!"

She was climbing onto his old desk chair when he made the door. He had a nanoklik to take in his desk as she coiled to leap. It was exactly as he'd left it; a chaotic pile of racing memorabilia from at least two planets, gaming console equipment in various stages of repair, game guides, Cybertronian playing cards, imbalanced but holding stacks of music discs, a tire full of mismatched dice, a Jenga set made of sanded two by six segments, several miles of wire, a Transformer-sized handheld media player courtesy of Sumdac, headphones, a set of Chiltons manuals, mirror ornaments (most unused, but so fun to collect), the spinning hubcaps Ratchet had refused to install for him, a license plate frame with blinky lights (ditto, with Prime seconding - some nonsense about an armor code), an "I Love Detroit" bumper sticker with "Detroit" in rainbow letters, a pair of old windshield wipers he'd never gotten around to throwing out, a waxing cloth, and a snow globe the size of Sari. There was also a stop sign turned hockey stick leaning against the desk edge. He could reach into that pile and find exactly what he wanted without so much as disturbing the snow globe, except for the times when he tried to demonstrate as much in front of the others and sent the whole mess to the floor; which was why he instantly noticed the one object he had not placed there.

He shot to the desk, skater-style, and snatched the object from under Sari's hands. The movement enveloped her in a small dust storm. Everything else in the room was spotless, but the maintenance bots had had orders not to touch this.

"Give that back," she coughed, groping blindly after him. Her feet caught in the wire. Bumblebee thumped down a forearm to keep her from falling off the edge of the desk. He plopped into the desk chair.

"Who writes paper letters anymore?" He popped the flap open. "You even went through the trouble of getting oversize stationary."

"It's called butcher paper. Don't get a big head."

"'Dear Bumblebee: Drop dead. If you were stupid enough to fly into an uncharted wormhole, you deserve to.' Ow. Harsh."

"I was a teenager." Sari crossed her arms over her chest, surrendering to the inevitable. Her hair bristled with dust and irritable static. "I wrote that so long ago that I'd forgotten all about it. My friends had just been listed as 'Presumed Dead' by the Elite Guard and anyone else searching for them who wasn't Prime or Ratchet."

"But... you didn't put a letter in Bulkhead's room."

"That's because I knew it had to be _your_ idea. Bulkhead was a victim of bad company."

"As usual," Bumblebee said ruefully. "'It's not like I care about bots who have no brains, or processors, or whatever it is you are supposed to have between your audio processors but don't.' Denial, minimizing, mm-hmm, classic symptoms."

Sari writhed, dying several kinds of death as he read the letter aloud.

"'It's not like I need you. It's not like I can't take care of myself. And I can't believe I ever thought of you as -'"

His optics widened. Sari seized the opportunity to climb over his forearm and snatch the letter out of his hand. She dropped from the desk to his knee to the floor. The wires snagged around her long hair and dragged half the contents of the desk after her. She landed, knees bent, amid a shower of music discs. Bumblebee caught the snow globe automatically, a movement still hardwired into his reflexes by all those failed demonstrations.

"Snooze you lose!" she yelled, and ran off into the hallway.

"'Was' a teenager, my skidplate," Bumblebee said.


	7. Chapter 7

Somewhere in the depths of Fortress Maximus, a communicator beeped.

"Bulkhead to Optimus. Prime, you there? Err - I guess I should say 'Magnus' now, huh?"

"Good to hear from you, Bulkhead. How goes it?"

"Well - Bumblebee finally figured out that Sari didn't age much while we were missing. Took him long enough."

"He could have asked me, like you did."

"You know him. He just makes assumptions and runs with them. It was so hard to keep a straight face."

Optimus chuckled. "Typical Bumblebee. What about the the rest? How's he dealing?"

There was a pause. "They went to visit the graves today."

" I see." There really wasn't anything else to say.

"Yeah." Bulkhead snuffled. "It tanks, being human. I'm glad you were here for Sari. Sounds like it was rough on her. Well, I better let you get back to being Boss-bot. Guess I can still call you that, huh, can't I? Bulkhead out."

Optimus leaned back from his desk, a familiar homesickness washing over him. He pulled up the visual from one of many Cybertronian satellites orbiting Earth and watched it for a while. Hurricane swirls of cloud, deep blue oceans, city lights like organic circuitboards clustered together on the dark side of the planet. Weather systems marched across North America. Rain was predicted for Detroit.

He missed it.

In a way, he was where he was meant to be: guiding Cybertron, restraining the dangerously misguided efforts of Sentinel Prime (once acting Magnus and sore that he wasn't still) to sanitize Cybertronian society, acting as first liaison and visionary in contacts with Earth and other worlds. But he couldn't help feeling that his time on Earth had been, and would always be, the most meaningful in his life. While a young bot yet, in that way, he was already over.

"I disagree," said a voice in his head.

"What?" He blinked. "Who's there?"

He saw another image, superimposed on his view of the command center. It was a moment before he could focus on it such that became comprehensible. When he did, it sent a shock through his circuits.

"Blackarachnia." The old, familiar, sometimes savage ache that never quite slept; the old wound that ran so deep it had become a part of him.

"Relax. I'm not here to fight." The image wavered. "In fact, it's debatable whether I'm 'here' at all. As far as I can tell, I'm contacting you from another dimension. Maybe. Certainly from another timestream."

"We'll get you out -"

She raised a hand. "Save it. I'm happy where I am. That's why I needed to talk to you, in fact."

Her voice had gone hesitant, even vulnerable. He waited.

"Ever the gentlebot, Optimus. Even after everything I've done to you. You've got class. Don't forget that."

She shook her head. "That wasn't what I called to say. Listen, Optimus, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what happened. For - for all of it, and everything that happened afterward. It was Sentinel's idea, but he wouldn't have pursued it if I had put my foot down. The truth is, the two of us couldn't even get along without you to dump on, and I guess that was why we wanted you to come."

He waited, until it was clear that she had finished and was starting to squirm. "Thank you. I'm sorry too."

She smiled her old smile, and he saw for a moment Elita-One. "Don't worry about me, Optimus. I've found my place. I hope you find yours."

She faded. He found himself staring at his desk, at the visual from the satellite, at a serenely rotating sphere of green and brown and blue.

His communicator beeped, jolting him out of his reverie.

"Optimus here. What is it?"

"Uh, Prime?" This time Bulkhead didn't apologize for using the wrong rank designation. "The City of Detroit just sent you an email. Guess they never took me off the carbon copy list. Bureaucracies, huh? After three hundred years! Ha, ha! There's a bunch of photo attachments in it. Along with a bill. Woops! - gotta go meet the others for dinner, talktoyoulaterPrimebye."

Optimus checked his email. A series of photos replaced the satellite visual, showing the gouges in the street fronting Sumdac Tower. Optimus knew exactly what had caused it.

"Bumblebee!"


	8. Chapter 8

"That one's Fanzone." She pointed. "There's the mayor. The two of them put their heads together with my dad and, with a little diplomatic pull from Optimus, got me identity papers. For all my personas. The Fanzones still know. They and my bodyguards... and my Cybertronian contacts." The skin around her eyes crinkled as she smiled up at him.

She stopped beside one last neatly trimmed plot of grass. The graves around it were in disrepair, but the maintenance bots had been at work on this one.

"That's Dad."

For the second time in three days, Bumblebee held his peace for five cycles.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there for you."

"Prime was here," she said bravely. "I mean, he was Prime at the time. I mean, he was Magnus by then, but he'll always be Prime to me, you know? (I can't stop calling him that. He doesn't mind.) He was - such a good listener." She laughed painfully at the memories. "And Ratchet - though he'd probably deny it if you asked him now. I even saw Prowl, in a dream. He understood."

"Sari..."

She sagged against his leg, sniffling. "I missed you. So much."

He knelt to lay his hand on her shoulders and let her leak as long as she needed to. Sometimes, between fender-raising adventures, he'd been afraid that time would make everything different - and he hadn't known _how much_ time. But time had compressed for him, hardening him like tempered cybertronium in a pressure furnace; while for her, time had stretched out into a long, endless sleep through which she walked dry-eyed. Until now.

She dried her eyes on her sleeve and dabbed apologetically at his paint. "Thanks, Bee."

He craned his neck, looking around the cemetery expectantly.

"What?" Sari craned her neck in turn. "What do you see?"

"I'm waiting for the wind."

"Come again?"

"You know, the wind. Every time there's a really emotional anime scene, the wind blows through the heroine's hair."

"Complete with flower petals that come from nowhere."

He pointed dramatically. "I see you watch _Girls of Gahooziwhatzit_ too!"

She laughed. "That's not its name."

"Close enough." He tugged her braid. "You're not wearing your hair down. That's probably why."

He gave her shoulders a final pat and stood up.

"Here."

She was holding out the letter. "I'm sorry I was such a baby about it before. You can have it."

"Had a change of spark?" He smirked and bent to look her in the eye. Scars inflicted by some vicious clawed alien gleamed across his cheek. "Sari, I don't need a letter to know how you feel about me."

"Maybe I _have_ had a change of spark and that's why I don't care if you do read the letter." She crossed her arms and sniffed.

"Oh, really? Then you won't mind if I read this aloud to _everybody here._ And some not here." He cleared his voice synthesizer. "Fanzone, you listening? Mayor, Sumdac? Prowl, you dig? 'The truth is that I -'"

"What? No! Don't tell them! I change my mind." She was as alarmed as though everyone mentioned was present in the flesh - and she did have the feeling that Prowl was watching, and chuckling. "Give it back!"

He scrambled onto the mayor's monument, out of her reach. "Make me."

She spread her hands. "Ohh, you are going to be sorry you said that."

Whatever he was going to say in return was forgotten. From his vantage point up on the monument, he had a better view of the cemetery, including the five or six newsbots trying to hide behind tombstones.

"Scrap! How long have they been listening? They'll eat me alive!" Sari had followed his line of sight. She broke into a run for the cemetery gate. "I need to get out of here!"

"Sari, wait!" Bumblebee jumped down after her. She skidded to a halt, ambushed by the swarm of newsbots that had been tucked behind the fence either side of the gate. She threw up her hands and flinched as a dozen photolights went off.

"Sari! This way!"

She jumped blindly for the sound of his voice. He scooped her up and tucked her against his side, a movement still hardwired into his servo memory. He sent a stinger blast into the offending swarm and heelwheeled down the cemetery path, carnations swirling in his wake. He jumped the fence opposite the gate and transformed in midair. Sari was strapped in and plastered against the back of her seat before she could rub the purple spots out of her vision.

"Faster!" she laughed. Outside the windows, Detroit became a blur, along with a mountain of CEO responsibilities. "Faster, faster!"

She threw her hands in the air when Bumblebee put on one of their mix tracks. Bumblebee let her roll down her window so she wouldn't blow her eardrums, much to the dismay of the nearby drivers.

"You gotta get current!" she screamed over the music. "This band has been off the air for centuries!"

"Then it's a classic!" Bumblebee screamed back.

"Just like your alt mode!"

"No dissing the ride! I held onto this alt mode across seven planets!"

Sari didn't turn a hair as Bumblebee performed a series of U-turns at speeds rivaling those of a bullet train. She gulped, though, as he turned beneath an underpass and up the inside slope. "What are you doing?"

"Showing off an upgrade." He hopped the vertical gap between the top and bottom inner surfaces of the underpass and magnetized his tires to the steel beams within the freeway above them. Sari's hair had come loose in the chaos. It swung free, tickling his roof, and gravity pressed her upside down against the seatbelt, but she didn't complain until the last of the newsbots had buzzed harmlessly below and disappeared.

"Every drop of blood I own is in my head."

Bumblebee swiveled his tires, calculating release trajectories. "You going to faint?"

"What? No! Are you kidding? That was the most fun I've had in years!"

"Well, you may want to in a minute." He tired of crunching numbers and transformed instead, landed off balance and collapsed on his back, catching Sari on his chest. She planted her hands on his face to keep herself from sliding off.

"I will not. Don't you remember our fact-finding mission to the roller coaster park? How many Hell Mountains did I ride?"

"Fifteen. Then you were so sick I had to take you home."

She laughed and patted his face. Her hand found the lines of his scar and traced them. The wind did come then, blowing her long hair into her eyes. It carried no petals, though; only bits of underpass litter. "I've been responsible for so long, I'd forgotten how much fun it is to blow everything off. Thanks. No way I'll pass out from a little upside down time."

"It's not that." He cleared his vocal synthesizer. "I dropped your letter at the cemetery."

She gaped. "For the newsbots to find?"

His grin had a touch of desperation about it. He considered finding the wormhole and jumping back in. "I hear Cybertron is nice this time of year. Want to come?"

"Bumblebeeeee!"

 _ **-the End**_

 _Author's Note: Reader reactions appreciated, as always._

 _ **Disclaimer:** This story not created, acknowledged or endorsed by Hasbro/Takara, to whom all relevant characters and trademarks belong. No infringement is intended. **Metal Sun** itself is fan domain and may be freely recopied and archived._


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